I Blame it on Panama
Posted: Saturday, August 06, 2011
by Jack H. Schick
I’ve got a headache. It might be from the couple of nitroglycerin tablets I took this morning after watching the news. I felt tightness in my chest and a stabbing pain in my heart after the financial report. I took an aspirin, too. There isn’t much more I can do--about the headache or the economy. I couldn’t get either of them off my mind, though. I figured either some rich guy or some poor guy was stealing all my money and gave up thinking about it. My mind wandered. Since my headache persisted, I started to wonder about my brain.
I was curious how the brain got like that. I’m a spiritual guy, but not a creationist. I believe Earth really is about 4.6 billion years old. I don’t know the details, and I’m not sure there isn’t some great purpose behind it all, but I believe organisms do constantly evolve and change in order to survive. I believe in ‘cavemen’ and that all the fossils and stone tools we’ve found really were made by some ape-like creature that wasn’t quite like us, yet.
So why did my brain get so big and complicated and start to work so much differently than the other animals on the planet? Everything has a brain. Some of them are just little nodules of cells that enable the creature to breathe and eat. Others are huge, like the whale and the elephant. Theirs are much bigger than ours, but ours is bigger compared to our body size. It wasn’t always that way.
Fossils show that about three million years ago (a mere blink of an eye in world history), ‘cavemen’s’ brains were about the size of an orange. Then it started to grow. Anthropologists used to think it was because we started to walk on two feet, freeing up our hands to fiddle with stuff and discover how to make tools and clubs. But, new discoveries show that ‘cavemen’ were walking on two feet millions of years before that.
Having a big brain isn’t economical. It makes up only about 2% of our body mass, yet the brain consumes 20% of the body’s energy. It’s also very selective in the kind of food it wants. It has absolute no use for fats. It uses huge quantities of glucose (sugar). It will starve and damage other bodily organs to get as much as it needs. Even if you’re starving to death, the brain will continue to consume energy at the same rate. This certainly was not advantageous to a ‘caveman,’ out there trying to club a rabbit or to find a root to dig up and eat.
A big brain also makes it a lot harder for the head to get out during birth. ‘Cavemen’ started to have less developed babies so it wasn’t so hard on the women. This meant they had helpless infants for a much longer time. It may have helped develop the family unit and our tendency to take care of each other, but it was a great disadvantage for survival in the prehistoric world of lions and tigers and bears.
The only advantage of the big brain was that the ‘cavemen’ could learn stuff. They could remember what time of year there was fruit on a certain tree, when there were fish in the creek and how to make something, like a sharp rock, to make it easier to go get some grub. Once they learned to make stuff they could protect themselves better, too. The ‘caveman’ became the first creature that could ‘hurt’ something at a distance by throwing a rock or a sharp stick.
Life was apparently pretty easy, though, because for millions of years their brain didn’t grow much. What, then, made it necessary for ‘cavemen’ to get a lot smarter about three million years ago? I read loads of material about it. There are a lot of different ideas. It seems every anthropologist has a different theory. Most centered around climate or environmental changes, though. Since nobody can claim to know the truth, anyone can believe almost anything. I finally decided it was because of Panama.
Five million years ago, when the orange-brained cavemen were poking around, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were connected. North and South America were not. As the continental plates drifted and collided, volcanoes began to emerge from the sea in the area where Panama and Central America now are. By about three million years ago the isthmus was formed. When the warming currents stopped circulating, the Arctic became much colder leading to an exceedingly sharp ice age in the northern hemisphere.
In Africa, where nearly everyone agrees the original ‘cavemen’ were living, there was a strong drying and cooling trend. The jungles and rivers where they were living, picking fruit and digging up roots, disappeared. Savannas and deserts formed. Life became much more difficult for all creatures. Luckily, Homo erectus had a good sized brain (a naval orange, I guess), that already worked a little differently than that of an elephant or even a monkey. It had to adapt to the new conditions, or die out. Their brains grew and they started thinking harder about stuff.
Over the next three million years the ‘cavemen’ migrated to the four corners of the world. They learned things, often the hard way, and got smarter and handier at making tools. They started to talk to each other, soon created art and music and effective weapons. They finally figured out how to tame animals, grow food and build cities. They developed writing and wheels, money and medicine, cars and TV’s.
That brings me back to today, to my headache and the morning news. My brain is working overtime on this mess. I’d like to blame the whole thing on Congress, or Wall Street, or on the President, I'm sure their all involved, but that will just make my headache worse. My research gives me a way out. I’m blaming it on Panama. Without Panama, I’d probably be sitting in the jungle happily picking berries and eating termites. A brain the size of an orange can't possibly ache as bad as this coconut I have now.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)I am continually amazed at how I continually learn things from you; and in such an enjoyable and readable format. Do you have any books?No books. Thanks for readign and commenting Dr. B.
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